Project funding: ERA-NET Cofund Urban Transformation Capacities (ENUTC)
Duration: 03/2022–03/2025
Trustmaking:
Empower youth, build capacities
Taking up TRUSTMAKING as an active and applicable response to the challenges of living together in cities, this research project aims to empower urban youth and build capacities of city governments for the new green transition. Establishing a trustful basis is key for well-informed, intergenerational, and cross-sector collaboration with city governments, entrepreneurs, and civil society organizations during urban development processes.
Through Place-making practices we aim at fostering confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces, working in and with green infrastructures in four European cities: Oslo (Norway), Panevėžys (Lithuania), Vienna (Austria), and Rotterdam (The Netherlands).
Through Urban Living Labs, tools for youth co-creation of green infrastructure are identified anAdmind developed, and cross-section collaboration mechanisms are designed in summer/winter schools.
Lastly, the development of TRUSTMAKING guidelines addresses capacity building in public service for integrating youth perspectives and competences that bridge short-term concerns and long-term objectives in urban transformation.
Project aims
The pandemic situation pushed society into a new type of unknown. In comparison to known-knowns, we are now facing the unknown-unknowns, which pose a potentially greater risk simply because they cannot be anticipated based on past experience. Youth and young people1 especially have been severely affected by the current pandemic with consequences for their physical and mental health (ILO 2020 , Mitra et al. 2020, WHO 2020, OECD 2020 etc.). Youth have noticed significant impacts on their rights to participate in public affairs and to leisure amongst others (ILO 2020).2 Also, youth’s trust that public spaces and social infrastructures such as schools, parks, playgrounds, sport facilities, youth centers provide safe spaces for social interaction and personal development has been undermined (Mitra et al. 2020). This is partially due to the mistrust of the public towards youth, generally prejudging them as irresponsibly meeting in public and disregarding rules to prevent spreading COVID-19. In sharp contrast to this, the ILO’s survey shows how youth’s “social activism and behaviours are contributing to mitigating the economic and social impacts of COVID-19, through compliance with government measures, volunteering, donations and outreach” (ILO 2020, 36). This dissonance between the perception towards youth and their impact pushes young people to the outskirts of active civic engagement. In other words, the act of taking responsibility is taken away from youth by showing distrust in their decisions.
This situation asks for a quick reaction to ensure communities have enabled resilience within them for the upcoming uncertainties, and as the scientific literature argues – social trust serves as an important starting point (see Fukuyama 1995, Bjørnskov 2005, Svendsen 2009) also for a sustainable recovery in a post-pandemic environment. Trust-making is an active and applicable response to challenges emerged through the pandemic. Trust is embodied in various socio-cultural domains such as accountability, safety, engagement, transparency etc. (Kramer et al. 1996) and also as a fundamental component to develop relations of authority (Sennett 1993, Verhoeven/Tonkens 2013). Yet, these phenomena talk more about the local cultural preconditions for the existence – or lack of – trust than the core universal principles of how trust is built. Taking into account different perceptions as trust-presence side effects in various cultures we can arrive at the building blocks for trust (re)creation. It makes the decision-making more effective and guides unspoken rules to work towards the better. Nonetheless, while young people have the right to participate in the decision-making processes that affect them, in reality, urban governments and policy makers still need to work on how to integrate youth participation mechanisms into the design and implementation of measures (OECD 2020, Bruselius-Jensen 2021). “Young people can act as a ‘connective tissue’ in public institutions, decision-making processes and public consultations to bridge short-term concerns and long-term objectives and build more fair and inclusive policy outcomes and societal resilience (OECD 2018, 69).
Scientific studies show the importance of access to and appropriation of green infrastructure and public space for personal development in terms of social skills and resilience by youth (Mitra et al. 2020, OECD 2020). In addition, people experience their relationships through everyday green infrastructure and public spaces (Layton/Latham 2021). Ways of getting around, signage, urban furniture, etc. affect trust between different actors. In this context, strategies for co-creation such as Placemaking (as a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood) allow stakeholders including youth to collectively (and in our sense intergenerationally) reimagine and reinvent public spaces. Trust-making is an innovative model – enhancing Placemaking – to promote trust via and through developing urban infrastructure.
Creating trust in general requires empowering the competences closest to the actual decision-making and cultivating trust core principles (familiarity, openness, vulnerability, consistency). The project aims at understanding the factors that determine the development of trust (in general) and more specifically with respect to youth. This engagement allows to transform core trust principles into context-specific actions and designs, while the method of Placemaking only implicitly takes trust into account. Trust-making through the means of infrastructure enhances Placemaking with a structure that explicitly (1) enables competencies needed for a particular place and (2) allows the comprehension of contested issues of transformation processes. As trust simplifies collaboration and promotes altruistic preferences in the population (Putnam 1993), it has also come to be understood as an important component in promoting democratic development and political engagement in society (Putnam 2000).
This project proposal seeks to foster confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces in transformation through creatively working in and with green infrastructures in four European cities and establishing a trustful basis for well-informed, intergenerational and cross-sector collaboration with policy makers, entrepreneurs, CSOs and urban governments in the course of urban transformation processes. Strategies for trust-building encourages to empower the most needed level of competence (Powell 1996), therefore, the project aims at understanding the relationship between trust-creating principles and urban spaces to reveal the best framework. As youth is identified as one of the most alienated in this context, the co-research and co-creation approach is focused on the interaction of youth with public authorities through the everyday public infrastructure youth experiences. Development of public infrastructure is situated in a local context with specific community, geography and stakeholders. The consortium will create an integral roadmap for trust-based solutions in different contexts. Application of trust-based principles creates the kind of infrastructure where people feel a strong stake in their communities and a commitment to making things better.
The goals of the project are (1) to initiate Urban Living Labs at four different sites in Austria, Lithuania, Norway, and The Netherlands, with a focus on youth in the four European cities, where (2) existing and new tools for youth co-creation of green infrastructure are identified and developed, and (3) cross-section collaboration and learning mechanisms through summer/winter schools are designed, in order to (4) develop guidelines of youth co-design and access of green infrastructures to increase capacities in public service for integrating youth’s perspectives and their abilities to “bridge short-term concerns and long-term objectives” (OECD 2018, 69) in urban transformation processes. For this reason the project will result in applicable principles for trust-building in public spaces. The knowledge-exchange through co-research and co-creation of youth and the partners with different expertise in interpreting collected data will determine valuable insights for all the related practitioners and policy-makers on a European level. The project’s aim is to lay down cornerstones for EU cities-shaping professionals to act out trust-creating principles in their work while at the same time supporting youth in taking up their role as change makers of urban spaces. If achieved, such a result contributes to cities’ recovery from the pandemic and opens up alternatives to deal with future uncertainties.
Trustmaking
TRUSTMAKING is an innovative approach to enhance Placemaking practise with trust-creating principles revealed from transdisciplinary research beyond city planning domains. This attempt will create new knowledge about how to improve the social contract between different stakeholders by hands-on public space co-production with youth. Elevating levels of trust improves citizenship, inclusion, and community – main elements of a safe city. The project’s aim is twofold and consists, on the one hand, of laying down cornerstones for European cities-shaping professionals to act out trust-creating principles in their work and, on the other hand, of supporting youth in taking up their role as change makers of urban spaces. Expected results are applicable principles for trust-building in co-creation processes of public space and green infrastructure.
Our methodology – considering this twofold aim – therefore is based on a transformative research approach, that provides “contexts for real-world experiments, which aim at an improved understanding of transformation processes and actively facilitate them” (Schneidewind 2016, 10; see also Schäpke et al 2015). The methodology of TRUSTMAKING as an iterative cycle of research, action and reflection applies mixed methods along the project duration. The proposed work packages of co-research (WP2), cross-section, co-creation in Urban Living Labs in four European municipalities (WP3–6) and cross-learning through creating an exchange network (WP7) reflect this iterative cycle. The non-linear and interrelated work mode comprises of: hypothesis (state of the art) → perception (experiments, workshops, etc.) → extending perception (through designing, prototyping, tangible results) → innovation (new models, new knowledge) → … in a cyclical manner.
To ensure the inclusion of youth perspective from the start, the research phase of this project is based on the principles of co-research for generating knowledge with extended ethical guidelines for non-discriminatory and collaborative, horizontal work processes (Collier 2019). Considering that co-research with youth should be emergent, open to changing and shifting to the needs of participants (ibid.), foreseen methods in this phase include but might go beyond:
- collective mapping, walking and focus interviews and photovoice, to identify and map site-specific issues according to youth needs and ideas to ensure that they can have a voice in sustainable urban development.
Based on co-research findings, the project will develop Urban Living Labs (ULL), as this approach tackles questions with regard to the joint production of knowledge reflecting on the theoretical assumptions, the power constellations and the objectives of joint knowledge production. This allows us to bridge our twofold aim of youth empowerment and city administration capacitation in intergenerational collaboration processes. ULL aim to understand and solve ‘real-world problems‘ in cities together with actors from civil society, politics, administration and the economy through asking stakeholders how to contribute actively to processes of “initiating, steering and increasing reflexivity in societal transformations” (Schneidewind et.al. 2016, 8). Within the development process of Urban Living Labs, hands-on methods of co-creation as well as already established tools of Placemaking are being applied.
- Implementation of hands-on workshops in which participants will apply collective knowledge and skills to co-create public space: eg. world cafés, open space conferences, fishbowl discussions, workshops on co-designing and co-building of public space (visioning, developing prototypes and testing new urban experiences developed by and primarily dedicated to the needs of youth)
- Placemaking tools to collectively re-imagine and re-invent public space: see https://placemaking-europe.eu/tools
The specific learnings and outcomes of our four Urban Living Labs require processes of cross-learning and cross-sectorial exchange in order to facilitate up-scaling processes and the development of general trust-based principles for co-creation in public space and green infrastructure. While cross-learning will be ensured on an intergenerational and cross-sectorial level between youth, city administrations and SME/CSO the Urban Living Labs, there will also be cross-learning activities with dialogue workshops (Labonté 2011) among project partners with invited experts during winter/summer schools. The creation of an exchange network platform – in collaboration with the digital platform European Network of Placemaking – ensures the visibility and dissemination of cross-learning outcomes of TRUSTMAKING. To ensure continuous development of Urban Living Labs and the maintenance of co-created projects beyond the project phase, corporation partners of city administrations will be provided with a guidebook of trust-making principles that facilitate policy development towards their engagement in these processes.
Research and innovation aspects
The project is exploring how cities function in terms of green infrastructure co-creation in order to add to the already established body of knowledge on Placemaking in cities and therefore serves as a foundation for future research and policy strategies. By building capacities on creating inclusive places shared by and with everyone the project also contributes to strategic urban research, adding to the universal body of knowledge about how different social, cultural, age, economic and other groups of people (in our case youth) have very different views on the city, processes of decision-making and expectations from the place. By testing research findings, the project will also contribute to the knowledge for decision makers and practitioners on what works, when attempting to improve cities in terms of inclusiveness and democratic values. Focusing on trust-creating principles when shaping public spaces and green infrastructure the project will contribute to the city-planning and policy knowledge of how to create resilient cities bottom-up. Experience of the urban environment is defined both by the subjective human principles (archetypes, superstitions, attitudes, fears, etc.), and the objective urban infrastructure (density, mixed use, design of public places, socio-demographic situation, etc.). Urban spaces for humans are not simply points A and B, but everything that happens between these two points. Trust-making activities and tools will reflect how these subjective and objective criteria interact with each other. Focusing on these interactions of human principles and urban infrastructure additionally means thinking of transformation processes as circular systems that require innovative nature-based solutions. Approaches such as closed-loop construction sites, onsite-recycling logistics and urban mining entail (technical) knowledge which we consider important to be shared in cross-learning processes and cross-sectorial information transfers in order to advance on these needed components of today’s economy and sources of welfare. Our transdisciplinary consortium (including expertise on circular economies) will contribute to a circular knowledge exchange between everyday requirements of city inhabitants (focus youth), regulatory-related concerns of decision-makers and technical solution-oriented innovations of enterprises (focus SMEs).